Restless in the dust!

By Jing Villamil

TEN years and thirteen days ago, 58 men and women, 32 of whom were journalists and stringers, were massacred in Sitio Masalay, in Ampatuan, Maguindanao. Their mangled bullet-drilled bodies were buried in wide shallow graves beside their cars equally mangled.

The journalists were to cover the filing of candidacy of then governor-aspirant Esmael “Toto” Mangundadato by his wife, family, friends and supporters. There was this hopeful prayer that by their sheer number alone, no harm shall blow a single strand of their hair to derail the exercise of this democratic right.

Their hopes and prayers were brought to naught. They were all blown away to kingdom come.

To this date, it is the world’s deadliest single attack on journalists. It is also the worst election-related violence in our history as a nation.

On December 19 this year, RTC Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes hands down her judgment on the principally accused, brothers Datu Andal “Unsay” Ampatuan Jr., Zaldy Ampatuan (both in jail) and Datu Sajid Islam Ampatuan (out on an P11.6 million bail and currently Mayor, Sharitt Saydona Mustapha), and more or less a hundred of their men. Clan patriarch Andal Ampatuan Sr., who allegedly planned the mass execution, died in 2015 while in jail.

Immediately after the massacre, I wrote about this dastardly event. Please, friends and readers, hold my hand and let us travel back in time, in angst and in anguish:

Two weeks before the day of the massacre, almost all (except the truly dumb and the very dead) in the village were aware that something was amiss. Even neighbors sharing their village borders keened from the stirrings of a distraught wind. Something was going on. Something was coming. And it was not only a wild storm rearing its hooves.

He who dared to challenge the gods must have felt it first. He should have had. He would not be raising his clenched fist to defy the king, his heirs and their minions . . . if he was not sensitive to the risks! He was of the place; the place was his second skin.

He must have known that no matter how he bowed his head to the ground, or how humbly polite he was when he asked for the nod of the gods to allow him to serve his people himself . . . he was courting trouble. It was no mean little thing he was asking for. It was even more than big. It was huge! He was Jack nudging with a kick the sleeping giant and his kins at the tip of the beanstalk!

Two weeks before the massacre, he could not have been deaf to the whispers of two wide craters being dug in this so out of the way place where no building shall ever stand, where no people shall ever work on desks or shop, where no good road shall ever pass. It was, after all, what has always been known to the natives as “the killing fields”.

 (To be continued.)

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